CHAPTER IV
THE FLAME IN A WOMAN'S EYES
"That girl loves you," Valentine had said, when Julian told him of Cuckoo's strange fragmentary sermon in the Monico, and of its effect upon himself.
Valentine spoke without any emotion or sympathy, and the absence of feeling from his voice seemed almost to bring a certain slight vexation into his manner. The love of Cuckoo, perhaps naturally, was to his fine nature a thing of no account, or even of ill account. At least, his look and manner faintly said so to Julian.
"But if she loves me," Julian said, and a certain wonder came into his heart at the thought, "surely she wouldn't behave to me as she does, turning me from a lover into a friend, and keeping me almost angrily in the latter relation."
"Perhaps not," Valentine said languidly.
No doubt he understood what Julian did not entirely understand, the subtleties of such a nature as Cuckoo's, a nature hammered out thin by cruel circumstance, drilled till it found the unspeakable ordinary and the loathsome inevitable, worn as a stone by dropping water till the water, ceasing to fall, must have left a loneliness of surprise. Julian did not fully realize that Cuckoo's life might well lead her to display real affection, if she possessed it, by ways the reverse of those naturally sought and gloried in by pure and protected women. To give is the act natural to the love of such women. It is at least their impulse, although restrained within strict limits, perhaps, by exigencies of conscience or of religion. But to give is the impulse, giving being the unusual act, the strange new act in them. Cuckoo's profession being an ordered routine of giving, how could she show her love better than by withholding? To be to Julian as she was to all men could prove nothing, either to him or to herself. To be to him as she was not to any other man whom she knew must mean something, argue something. So, at least, dimly and without mental self-consciousness, her mind reasoned rather instinctively, for the lady of the feathers was, above all things, instinctive. Instead of logic, ethics, morals, the equipment of sage, philosopher, good women, she had instinct only. Instinct told her the secret meaning of reticence in her relations with Julian. When she said good-bye to him, the hand-shake that passed between them had become something more to her than a kiss. She kissed so many whom she hated, so many who were dolls of vice to her, who were walking sins, incarnate lust shadows, scarcely men. To be to Julian what another woman might have been would be to seem to make him as all those dolls of horrible London. So Cuckoo set him apart by her relations towards him, as she had previously set him apart in her heart. She pushed the chair of her beloved from the heart where the dolls sat night after night warming their expressive hands at the cheap and ever-burning fire. She pushed it out into a circle of cold that was the only sacred thing she could supply. The world and her situation in it had bereft her of the power of even proving the simplicity of love by simplicity of natural action. She had to find a new way to show an old worship. She found it in refusal, where others find it in assent.
But, after all, she was a woman, and perhaps she wished Julian to be an anchorite. That was what Valentine meant when, after Julian's account of Cuckoo's anger on finding him in Piccadilly, he simply said:
"That girl loves you."
The sentence stirred Julian to a surprise warmer than seemed reasonable, for he had really known that Cuckoo had some feeling for him. But he had always at the back of his mind the idea, common to so many, that such a girl as Cuckoo could not be capable of the real love, the love ascetic, not the love Bacchanalian. Love among the roses is easy, but not many can welcome love among the nettles; and, moreover, Julian, despite his knowledge of the thorny paths along which Cuckoo walked habitually, along which all her poor sisterhood walked incessantly, had not entirely disabused himself of the fallacy that a life such as hers was, in some vague, undefined and indefinable way, a life of pleasure. Even when we know a thing to be, we often cannot feel it to be. Knowledge in the mind does not inevitably bring to the birth sensation in the heart, or even the mental apprehension, half reasonable and half emotional, on the base and foundation of which it is comparatively easy to ground acts that indicate an understanding.
From Valentine's remark Julian understood him to mean that Cuckoo's anger was entirely caused by jealousy, not at all by a fine desire of protecting some one stronger than herself from that which she knew so well through her own original weakness. Yet that was what Julian had been led to believe, not by any hint of Cuckoo's, but by something within himself.
"I don't see why she should love me," he said, presently.
"You're well off, Julian," Valentine rejoined.
Almost for the first time in his life Julian felt angry with Valentine.
"You don't know her at all," he said, hotly.
"I know her class."
Julian looked at him, and his anger died, as his mind sailed off on a new tack.
"Her class! Then you must have been studying it lately, Val. Not long ago you could not have studied it. Your nature would not have let you."
"That is true enough."
"Were you studying it when we met you the other night?"
"Yes."
"With what result?" Julian asked with eager curiosity.
"That I understand something I never understood before—the charm of sin."
Julian was greatly surprised at this deliverance of his friend, who uttered it in his coldly pure voice, looking serenely high-minded and even loftily intellectual.
"You find the charm of sin in Piccadilly?"
"I begin to find it everywhere, in every place in which human beings gather together."
"You no longer feel yourself aloof from the average man, then?"
Valentine pressed his right hand slowly upon Julian's shoulder.
"No longer," he answered quietly. "Julian, you and I are emerging together from the hermitage in which we have dwelt retired for so long. I always thought you would emerge some day. I never thought I should. But so it is. Don't think that I am standing still while you are travelling. It is not so."
The strength of his hand's grip upon Julian's shoulder seemed to indicate a violence of feeling which the tones of his voice did not imply. Julian listened, and then said, in a hesitating, irresolute manner:
"Yes, I see, Val; but I say, where are we travelling? or, at least, where shall we travel if we don't pull up, if we keep on? That's the thing, I suppose."
As he spoke he did not tell himself that it was nothing less than the disconnected and ungrammatical remarks of the lady of the feathers which prompted this consideration, this prophetic movement of his mind. Yet so it was. And when Valentine replied he, the saint, was fighting against her, the sinner, and surely in the cause of evil. For he said lightly:
"After all, do human souls travel? I often think they are like eyes looking at a whirling zoetrope. It is the zoetrope that travels."
"You think souls don't go up or down?"
"I think that none of us knows really much about souls, and that, after all, it is best not to bother ourselves too much about them."
"Marr thought a great deal about them. I used to fancy that as some maniacs have been known to murder people in order to tear out their hearts, he could have murdered them to tear out their souls."
Valentine took his hand from Julian's shoulder.
"Marr is dead and forgotten," he said almost sternly.
"I can't quite forget him, Val; and I still feel as if he had had some influence over both of us. We have changed since those days of the sittings, since that night of your trance and his death."
Julian was looking at Valentine in a puzzled way while he spoke.
Valentine met his eyes calmly.
"If I have changed," he said slowly, "it cannot be in essentials. Look at me. Is my face altered? Is my expression different?"
"No, Valentine."
Julian said the words with a sort of return to confidence and to greater happiness. To look into the face of his friend set all his doubts at rest. No man with eyes like that could ever fall into anything which was really and radically evil. Valentine perhaps was playing with life as a boy plays with a dog, making life jump up at him, dance round him, just to see the strength and grace of the creature, its possibilities of quick motion, its powers of varied movement. Where could be the harm of that? And what Valentine could do safely he began to think he might do safely too. He gave expression to his thought with his usual frankness.
"You mean you are beginning to play with life?" he said.
"That is it exactly. I am putting life through its paces. After all, no man is worth his salt if he shuts himself up from that which is placed in the world for him to see, to know, and perhaps—but only after he has seen and known it—to reject. To do that is like living in the midst of a number of people who may be either very agreeable or the reverse, and declining ever to be introduced to them on the ground that they must all be horrible and certain to do one an infinity of harm."
"Yes, yes, I see. Then you think that Cuckoo is jealous of me?—that that was all she meant?"
Julian again returned to the old question. Valentine replied:
"I feel sure of it. Women are always governed by their hearts. So much so that my last sentence is a truism, scarcely worthy the saying. Besides, my dear Julian, what would it matter if she were not? What could the attitude of such a woman on any subject under the sun matter to you?"
The words were not spoken without intentional sarcasm. They stung Julian a little, but did not lead him, from any sense of false shame, to a feeble concealment of his real feeling.
"It does seem absurd, I dare say," he said. "But she's—well, she's not an ordinary woman, Val."
"Let us hope not."
"No; you don't understand. There's something strong about her. What she says might really matter, I think, to a cleverer man than I. She knows men, and then, Valentine, there's something else."
He stopped. There was a queer look of mystery in his face.
"Something else! What is it? What can there be?"
"I saw the flame as if it was burning in her eyes."
Valentine made an abrupt movement. It might have been caused by surprise, annoyance, anger, or simply by the desire to fidget which overcomes every one, not paralyzed, at some time or another. His action knocked over a chair, and he stooped to pick it up and set it in its place before he spoke. Then he said:
"The flame, you say! What on earth is your theory about this extraordinary flame? You seem to attach a strange importance to it. Yet it can only be the fire of a fancy, a jet from the imagination. Tell me, have you any theory about it, honestly? and if so, what is it?"
Julian was rather taken aback by this very sledgehammer invitation. Hitherto the flame, and his thought of it, had seemed to have the pale vagueness and the mystery of a dream. When the flame appeared, it is true, he was oppressed by a sense of awe; but the awe was indefinite, blurred, resisting analysis, and quite inexplicable to another.
"I did not say I had any theory about it," he answered.
"But then, why do you consider it at all? And why seem to think that its supposed presence in the eyes of a woman makes that woman in any way different from others?"
"But I did not say I thought so," Julian said, rather hastily. "How you jump to conclusions to-day!"
"You implied it, and you meant it. Now, didn't you?"
"Perhaps I may have."
"This is all too much for me," Valentine said, showing now a very unusual irritation. He even began to pace up and down the room with a slow, soft footstep, monotonous and mechanical in its regularity. As he was walking he went on:
"I do really think, Julian, that it is a mistake to allow any fancy to get upon your nerves. You know what the doctor thought about this flame."
"Yes."
"And you know what I think."
"Do I?"
"Yes, that it is a mere chimera. But my opinion on such a subject has no particular value. The doctor is different. He is a great specialist. The nerves have been his constant study for years. If this vision continues to haunt you, you really ought to put yourself definitely into his hands."
"Perhaps I will," said Julian.
He spoke rather seriously and meditatively. Valentine, possibly because he was in the sort of peculiarly irritable frame of mind that will sometimes cause a man to dislike having his tendered advice taken, seemed additionally vexed by this reply, or at any rate struck by it. He paused in his walk, and seemed for an instant as if he were going to say something sharply sarcastic. Then suddenly he laughed.
"After all," he exclaimed in a calmer voice, "we are taking an absurdity mighty seriously."
But Julian would not agree to this view of the matter.
"I don't know that we are," he said.
"You don't know!"
"That is an absurdity. No, Valentine, I don't; I can't think that it is.
I saw it in Cuckoo's eyes only once, and that was—just—"
"Tell me just when you saw it."
The words came from Valentine's lips with a pressure, a hurry almost of anxiety. He seemed curiously eager about the history of this chimera. But Julian, eager too, and engrossed in thoughts that moved as yet in a maze full of vapors and of mists, did not find time to notice it.
"I noticed it just after, or when, she was begging me to go home."
"Like a good boy," Valentine hastily interposed. "Because her jealousy prompted her to hate the thought of your having any pleasure in which she did not share. Oh, you noticed the flame then. Did it, too, tell you to go home?"
He spoke rather harshly and flippantly, and apparently put the question without desire of an answer, and rather with the intention of ridicule than for any other reason. But Julian took it seriously and replied to it.
"Somehow I felt as if, perhaps, it did wish to speak some message to me, and that the message came, or might come, through her."
He spoke slowly, for indeed it was this action of words that was beginning to make clear to himself his own impression, so vague and so unpresentable before. As he thus traced it out, like a man following the blurred letters of an old inscription with the point of his stick, and gradually coming at their meaning, his excitement grew. He said, speaking with a rising emphasis of conviction:
"I'm not a mere fool. There is—there is something in all this; I feel it; I cannot be simply imagining. There is something. But I'm like a man in the dark. I can't see what it is; I can't tell. But you, Valentine, you, with your nature, so much better than I am, with so much deeper an insight, how is it you don't see this flame? Unless,"—and here Julian struck his hand violently on the table,—"unless it comes, as it seemed to come that night in the darkness, from you. If it's part of yourself—but then"—and his manner clouded again—"how can that be?"
"How indeed?" said Valentine, who had been watching him all through this outburst with a scrutiny that seemed almost uneasy, so narrow and so determined was it.
"Julian, listen to me; you trust me, don't you, and think my opinion worth something?"
"Worth everything."
"Well, I believe you're getting into an unnatural, if you weren't a man I should say a hysterical—habit of mind. If you can't throw it off by yourself, I must help you to do so."
"Perhaps you're right. But how will you help me?"
Valentine seemed to think and consider for a moment. Then he exclaimed:
"I'll tell you. By making you join with me in putting this life, this old life—new enough to both of us—through its paces. Why should each of us do it alone? We are friends. We can trust one another. You know me through and through. You know the—chilliness I'll call it—of my nature, my natural bookishness—my bias towards contemning people too readily, and avoiding what all men ought to know. And I know you. Without you I believe I should never go any distance. Without me you might go too far. Together we will strike the happy medium. For us life shall go through all his paces, but he shall never lame us with a kick, like a vicious horse, or give us a furtive bite when we're not looking. Men carry such bites and kicks, the wounds from them, to their graves. We'll be more careful. But we'll see the great play in all—all its acts. And, when we've seen it, we'll be as we were, only we'll be no longer blind. And we'll never forget our grand power of rejecting and refusing."
"Ah!" said Julian. "Perhaps I haven't that power."
"But I have."
"Yes, you have."
"And I'll share my power with you. We are friends and comrades. We ought to share everything."
"Yes," exclaimed Julian, carried away. "Yes, by Jove, yes!"
"And as to this flame—"
"Ah!"
"We'll soon know if it's a vision or a reality. But it's a vision. You saw it in a woman's eyes."
"I'll swear I did."
"Then that proves it's a fraud. The flame in a woman's eyes never burnt true yet—never, Julian, since the days of Delilah."